I managed to finish the seasons of TWO separate shows this week and part of the reason I am writing about them is my recent promise to myself that I would be more consistent about reviewing what I watched but also that I wanted to put in my very early Emmy/Golden Globe nods NOW before I forget!!

First up; The Crown; Season 4.

If you haven’t watched any part of this show, you can go ahead and take your time now; it’s going on a two year hiatus while it does it signature casting change over between its double season break, so you’ve got plenty of time. For the un-informed, every two years thus far, the cast has changed hands every two seasons. For example; Queen Elizabeth herself went from being played by Claire Foy in seasons 1 & 2, to be played by Olivia Coleman in seasons 3 & 4. In the final seasons 5 & 6, Elizabeth will be played by (hold onto your kittens!) Imelda Staunton-Sqeeeeee!

All four seasons have been stellar of course, winning numerous awards. Both Claire Foy and Olivia Coleman both have won a fair amount as have many of their co-stars.

But this last season stood out for me especially. Introducing Princess Diana as a character was something we had all been waiting for and she did not disappoint. Whether or not every single moment of this adaptation is true or not doesn’t really matter – Season 4 perfectly cements for us what happens when the Royal family handles its infidelities in closed door meetings.

As usual the cast is stellar. Olivia Coleman has grown Elizabeth into the old codger everyone in the 80’s imagined her to be. Stuffy, unimaginative and stubbornly detached from her children and their love lives. Tobias Menzies and Helena Bonham-Carter remain brilliant and I am a huge fan of Erin Dougherty who plays the ever stubborn Princess Anne.

But my personal favorite is Josh O’Connor who plays Prince Charles. O’Connor plays Charles with a permanent slouch that is so pronounced I am afraid he may suffer from a serious back injury from this performance. The more this season settled in, the more fascinated with his performance I became. Whether or not this is how the real Prince Charles behaved, you have to admire the direction that O’Connor has gone with this character.

There are so many feelings you cannot help but have for Charles. The shit lousy position his family continuously puts him in is simply horrifying. Right from the start of the season Philip challenges Elizabeth to state who her favorite child is. For Philip it is simple, the answer is Anne, who is as cold and as no nonsense as he is. Elizabeth is stunned at his truthfulness. She has no idea who her favorite is and has to set up lunch dates with her own children to figure it out!

But after the wrap up of season 4 it will not surprise me in the slightest if two new names get added to the extensive list of actors, and I don’t think it will be the scene-stealing Lady Di.

Spoiler alert: it isn’t Charles. It couldn’t be. Charles is the heir and the heir has responsibilities and duties.

There is no love lost between Philip and Charles and whatever love there could have been between Charles and the Queen was cut off early on. Both he and Anne were left often as children and it shows. But while Anne has hardened over the years, Charles has never really gotten over that abandonment. And Josh O’Connor wears that abandonment like a heavy cloak. It weighs him down, perhaps more heavily than the real Prince Charles, but the action is almost its own character. O’Connor uses the action not just when he is hurt or angry, especially at Diana, but when he is feeling trapped by his family or feeling helpless and lost which is often.

O’Connor plays Charles with an understanding none of us gave the man at the time: confused as to why no one sees the problem and willing to do almost anything to get out of it. His sister Anne explains it to the Queen rather perfectly. “Charles is older than his years and Diana younger than hers, which makes it not an age gap, but an age chasm. They come from similar aristocratic backgrounds, but their personalities come from different planets. They have different interests, different friends. He doesn’t understand her, she doesn’t understand him. And considering all that, they’ve actually done remarkably well.”

Whether any of this is true doesn’t matter. Josh O’Connor gives us a Prince Charles who was beaten down long before his marriage. All he wants is to be loved by someone, desperately noticed and given a little attention. So when Diana steps into all of their lives, everyone latches on without a thought for the damage they are doing to her or the Prince. And O’Connor’s ability to show us that damage is really extraordinary. He is abusive to Diana and we hate him for it. But that doesn’t mean we don’t feel terrible for him as well.

I’m afraid Emma Corrin will steal the show for her performance as Princess Diana, which was fantastic of course, but for me it is Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher herself who was scene stealing in every sense of the word. When I say I did not recognize Gillian Anderson the first two episodes of the season I mean it. She has done for Thatcher what Gary Oldman did for Churchill. The transformation is simply astounding and downright terrifying.

The first season of the show found us all pleasantly fawning over John Lithgow and his award winning performance as Winston Churchill, Elizabeth’s favorite Prime Minister. I absolutely adore this man, and it seems he only gets better and better with age. But no matter who he plays, he is instantly recognizable. I recently watched him give a stunning performance in Bombshell as Roger Ailes of Fox News fame. Even under pounds of makeup and a fat suit, I knew it was John Lithgow.

Not so with Gary Oldman who has been fooling us all for years as a chameleon of an actor. In his own award winning turn as Winston, you simply cannot tell it is him. To this day I can’t even tell you how old Gay Oldman is!

Now I am going to make the same comparison about two woman to play Margaret Thatcher. Meryl Streep wins her 3rd Oscar and 3rd Golden Globe for The Iron Lady in 2012. It is an amazing performance from the greatest actress’s of our time. But she is still Meryl Streep and I would recognize her anywhere. Not so for Gillian Anderson. Like I said, I NEVER would have guessed it was her. Ms. Anderson has a way of making Thatcher move that is hard, angular and almost brittle. Eleven years pass in this season, the entirety of The Prime Minister’s tenure. And Anderson makes them count. For every moment that the Queen ages into a softer, doughier, perhaps even more family focused (in her own way) sort of woman, Margaret by turn, becomes thinner, more stubborn and less compromising. She will not bend, she will not give in and the ways in which Gillian Anderson is able to wrench certain tells out of Thatcher in the times that she DOES lose and she needs us to know it, are simply glorious. She looks almost birdlike at times. She will fight to keep her lips from shaking and starting to cry. She will let her eyes lose focus for a second, wrinkle her nose as if she smells something rotten.

And all the while she walks hard and mean with a tiny hunch to her back and a purposeful overly dramatic voice of someone who has spent years perfecting how to speak and how to sound in front of crowds of judging men. I was astounded by her performance, so different from Streep’s but just as attention worthy.

The Undoing

A week after I started this show and had nearly finished it, EVERYONE else I knew started watching it! It was my little secret at first, but now I have to suffer through pretending I don’t know who did it!

So by way of NOT talking about the spoilers I am going to tell you that this is by far the best performance I have ever seen Hugh Grant give. I am trying to think of the last thing I even saw the charming English playboy in. It has to have been a while, because dear Hugh has definitely aged. Not that that’s a bad thing at all! Yes, he is scruffy, a few age spots, a little paunchy, but those laugh lines hint at the darling effusive scamp we all adored. It is heart warming watching him joke around with his son, flirt with his wife and tease his young oncology patients, doing it all with a hint of a young man he was and the pain of an older one who has been through the hardness of life.

You have never seen Hugh Grant play this version of Hugh Grant before. Whether you think he did it or not doesn’t really matter, there are moments when he mean, truly mean. I’ve never seen that before. He is manipulating and calculating. It is possible the show wants us to think his character is that way but that’s beside the point; it is Grant’s acting that is doing the job. And he is doing it so subtly that for six episodes no matter how he behaves, I am rooting for him. But this is a harder, colder version of Hugh than you have ever seen before. If this role does not open up more roles like this for Mr. Grant and fast, I don’t know what would!

Up next: Prom!